Views of Ancient Mesopotamia

Ancient Mesopotamia in Classical Greek and Hellenistic
Thought

The Predecessors of Herodotus

Achamenid Persia conquered Lydia in the 540s, resulting in the
absorption of the Greek cities of western Anatolia into an imperial
state of immense size, eventually embracing all the eastern nations
with which the Greeks had had contact with until then. The Persian
expansion constituted a turning point for the Ionian cities, as
attested by Xenophanes of Colophon (second half of the sixth
century BCE): "Such things should be said beside the fire in
the wintertime when a man reclines full-fed on a soft couch
drinking the sweet wine and munching chickpeas -- such things as
'Who and from where are you? And how old are you? Of what age
were you when the Mede came?" (No 18).

The inexorable advance of the previously unknown Persians which
threatened not to stop at the Aegean but to sweep into mainland
Greece, made it imperative for Greeks to try to explain the rise of
the Persians and trace their links with other people. The formation
of the Persian Empire may also have made it easier to travel in the
eastern territories. One writer who traveled extensively in the
Persian Empire, including possibly Mesopotamia, was Hecataeus of
Miletus (circa 500 B.C.E.). Unfortunately, it remains uncertain
that he included anything about either Assyria or Babylonia in his
two works, the Periegesis and the Genealogiai,
both now lost. This is a pity, as it is known from a reference in
Herodotus that Hecataeus tried, in his work on genealogies, to
question the Greek view of early history by showing that the
generations of Greek heroes reached back only a few hundred years,
as opposed to the thousands of years found among some eastern
peoples.

Three other Ionian Greeks almost certainly composed works on
Persian history and customs (Persica) before Herodotus
wrote his great work. All of them wrote after Xerxes's invasion
of mainland Greece, and their purpose was clearly to commemorate
the unexpected and decisive victories won by the Greeks on that
occasion. All their works, like those of Hecataeus, are lost, and
it is hard in the case of two of them (Dionusius of Miletus and
Charon of Lampascus) even to approximate how their histories were
structured. The Persica of Hellanicus of Lesbos, in two
books, is a little better known from surviving fragments. The work
covered the history of Assyria and Media and the rise of Persia.
The reigns of Cambysis and Darius were treated in some detail and
there was, almost certainly, an extensive section on Xerxes's
invasion. Two fragments of Hellanicus reveal something of the kind
of Mesopotamian material he included. First, he presents the
Chaldeans as a people (not a priestly group) descended from
Andromeda's father, Cephaus. This meant that, according to his
genealogical scheme, they were older than the Persians, who were
the descendants of Andromeda's son, Perseus. The second passage
is particularly fascinating: Hellanicus had apparently collected a
not always consistent series of stories about an Assyrian king,
Sardanapalus (the name is probably a bowdlerized conflation of
Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal). According to some of the stories,
Sardanapalus was a great hero; according to others, he was a
luxury-loving weakling. In true Ionian rationalizing style,
Hellanicus argued for the existence of two Assyrian kings with the
same name. What is quite uncertain, given the very fragmentary
nature of the surviving material, is to what extent the information
in Hellanicus was new to the Greeks; his speculation about the
identities of Sardanapalus could be taken to imply that his
audience knew of the existence of the Assyrian king, and the
genealogical information could have been part of the Greek
worldview he was reinforcing. One other interesting piece of
information that can be gleaned from Hellanicus is that the concept
that empires were destined to succeed each other existed; the
earliest was Assyria, succeeded by Media, which was displaced by
Persia.

Herodotus

Although Herodotus
could fit into this pattern of Greek works on Persia, and he
undoubtedly owed a good deal to the ethnographies of his
predecessors, his work is radically different in scope and purpose.
It is much longer than theirs, and he presents the results of his
"inquiries" (historia) into the conflict between
Persia and Greece and theorizes how the Persians justified their
act of aggression. In the first chapters of his historia
Herodotus reports that "Persian learned men" claimed that
the Persians were avenging the disproportionate Greek action
against Troy. Herodotus does not find this explanation ridiculous,
but he questions the right of Persians to enter a quarrel between
Greeks and cities in western Anatolia at a time when Persia was not
yet a nation. To demonstrate the relatively recent arrival of the
Persians on the scene, Herodotus traces the background of all the
peoples Persia eventually absorbed. This requires him to consider
Assyria, which in Greek eyes had been the first state to exercise
hegemony in Asia. In his section on Babylonia, Herodotus tells his
readers of plans to discuss the Assyrian kings in a separate
section on Assyrian history; but there is no such detailed
discussion, and scholars speculate that the work either has been
lost or was never written.

Clearly, Herodotus was operating with a picture of Assyrian
history that circulated widely among the Greeks, but is scattered
through his work: the founder of Nineveh, Ninus, appears at the
beginning, in the context of Lydian history; he includes an
anecdote about Sardanapalus as he describes his visit to Lake
Moeris in Egypt; the fall of Nineveh is part of his Median history.
A story about Sennacherib's unsuccessful attack on Egypt
clearly depends on Egyptian accounts, but Herodotus makes no
attempt to link him with other Assyrian kings. The only new
information that Herodotus provides is a chronological framework:
the Assyrian empire lasted 520 years and fell toward the end of the
seventh century.

Much more extensive is Herodotus's excursus on Babylonia and
its history. Whether the account is based on personal observation
during his travels -- and how extensive these might have been -- or
whether it is derived from informants is, as with much of
Herodotus's information, hotly disputed. His description of the
layout of the city of Babylon and of its major sanctuaries has
rightly elicited praise from archaeologists who match it well with
the results of their excavations. Much more difficult to assess is
Herodotus's description of Babylonian customs, which seems to
be influenced bu a Greek tendency -- developed in the wake of the
Persian wars -- to judge other cultures by how much they deviated
from Greek social behavior, deemed the civilized norm. Certain key
features of the alien society -- particularly female behavior,
marriage practices, rituals surrounding death, eating habits, and
religious beliefs - were selected to demonstrate how far various
non-Greek communities diverged from familiar Greek practices. By
dwelling on differences to create contrast, however, non-Greek
mores can become seriously distorted and leave us wondering to what
extent they reflect reality. This feature of Greek writers,
especially of Herodotus, should serve as a warning against
simplistic attempts to harmonize Herodotus's account of
Babylonian life and the evidence of Babylonian society contained in
the Mesopotamian texts.

On Babylonian history Herodotus presents some information not
encountered earlier. He mentions the Assyrian queen Semiramis as a
builder of Babylon, but otherwise he says very little about her. He
mentions two Babylonian kings, both called Labynetus, and a queen,
Nitokris. He clearly perceives them as ruling only in Babylon,
although in the Herodotean view Babylon was a great city in
Assyria; for him the political distinction between Assyria and
Babylonia remains fuzzy. Very important is Herodotus's finding
that there were powerful rulers in Babylonia, contemporary with the
kingdom of the Medes, whose power was not extinguished until Cyrus
the Great of Persia conquered Babylonia. The identity of the
Babylonian kings mentioned by Herodotus and their chronology have
been the subject of extensive, but totally inconclusive debate. In
Herodotus's scheme, Semiaramis obviously belongs to the period
before the fall of Nineveh, while Nitokris, who is described as a
great builder, obviously belongs after the Assyrian collapse. It
has been observed that the two queens duplicate each other, and
that the name of Nitokris seems to have been imported by Herodotus
from Egypt. Trying to unravel the Herodotean account and to match
historically attested Mesopotamian royal figures with the queens
are impossible. And perhaps also misconceived exercises, especially
when Semiarmis's exploits are attributed by Hellanicus of
Lesbos to the Persian queen Atossa. Perhaps a complex of stories
concerning a famous Mesopotamian queen existed, some associating
her with Assyria and some with Babylonia, but, given his
chronological structure, Herodotus was forced to turn her into two
separate persons. The two identically named Babylonian kings are
more readily decipherable: one represents the shadowy and
unimpressive last Babylonian ruler, defeated by Cyrus; the other, a
respected earlier king called upon to settle a boundary dispute
between the Medes and Lydians in 585 B.C.E..

Fundamentally important in Herodotus's account is his
recognition of the existence of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, however
vague he is on details. Semiramis appears for the first time in his
history, although it is possible that an earlier poem by Panyassis
mentioned her. It is also possible that the idea of the Chaldeans
as a Babylonian priestly or learned class should be attributed to
Herodotus. While Semiramis and the Chaldeans continued to be
featured in subsequent classical accounts of the East, the
Neo-Babylonian phase of Mesopotamian history virtually vanished
when treated by Herodotus's successor on near eastern history,
Ctesias. Following Herodotus, Greek popular perceptions of
Mesopotamian history appear limited to the well-known themes of
Sardanapalus's fabulous wealth (Aristophanes, The
Birds, 2.1022) and the fall of Nineveh (Herodorus in
Aristotle's On the History of Animals 8.183).

Ctesias's Persica

Ctesias, a Greek doctor at the Persian court at the end of the
fifth and the beginning of the fourth century, produced an enormous
work on Persian history in twenty-three books, in which he
discredited a great many of Herodotus's findings on eastern
history. Since he had spent considerable time in the heartland of
the Persian Empire, his claim to present authentic information was
strong. Yet where it is possible to check his account, which
survives only in selective though substantial fragments and a later
summary, his information is considerably inferior to that of
Herodotus. One problem is trying to understand how Ctesias compiled
his history: Did he fabricate events in order to discredit
Herodotus, at the same time relying on his Persian connection to
bolster his own credibility? Or did he faithfully reproduce Persian
traditions? The latter view is quite widely accepted, with the
result that while it does not imrpove the quality of Ctesias's
account, it can provide some very interesting insights into how
fifth/fourth-century Persians viewed their past.

According to Ctesias, the Assyrian Empire, to which he devoted
three books, was a model the Persians sought to follow. He seems to
have recounted in immense detail (probably the whole of books 1 and
2) the exploits and romance of King Ninus and Queen Semiramis, the
latter turned into an enormously powerful figure who campaigned
extensively on the Iranian plateau and regions farther east. This
was followed by the history of her son, Ninyas. It is uncertain
whether the fall of Nineveh was included in book 3 or formed part
of book 4. What is clear is that Ctesias dated Assyria's fall
to about 860 B.C.E., attributing it to a Mede called Arbaces. The
Neo-Babylonian Empire was effectively omitted from this
reconstruction; Babylonia appeared only as a province of the Median
Empire, which a Chaldean, Belesys, was permitted to rule as
governor - his reward for correctly foretelling Arbaces's
military success (see Diodorus Siculus 2.24-28). Where Herodotus
had demonstrated that Mesopotamian history did not end with the
fall of Nineveh, Ctesias placed Assyria in the dim and distant
past, emphasizing instead the antiquity of the Iranian empires.

Ctesias's version of eastern history became the standard
account at least by the third century. Later compilers of universal
histories, such as Diodorus Siculus, Pompeius Trogus, and Nicolaus
of Damasucs (first centuries BCE and CE), followed it.

Mesopotamia: Fantasy and Fiction

The segment of Babylonian society that exercised a continuous
fascination for classical writers was the "Chaldeans,"
Babylonian scholars famous from the fourth century B.C.E. for their
immense learning about the courses of heaven and hence for their
ability to forecast events with great accuracy. Despite the many
references to them that surface in classical texts, there is no
evidence whatsoever that anyone in the classical world before the
first century B.C.E. seriously studied Babylonian astronomy and
astrology. The Greek and Babylonian forms of these science appear
to have developed independently but in parallel. What is
interesting here is that the Greeks so greatly respected
Babylonia's primacy in this sphere of knowledge that many
famous Greek scholars and prominent philosophers were credited with
connections to Babylonia and the Chaldeans. For example, Pythagoras
was credited by Aristoxenos, pupil and close friend of Aristotle,
with having studied with the "Chaldean Zaratas"
(Zoroaster).

Chaldeans were supposed to have foretold Euripdes's future
poetic success (Aulius Gellius attributed this to either Theopompus
or Philochorus). What was being exploited here was the idea of an
arcane culture (or cultures, as indicated by the confusion of the
Iranian Zoroaster with "Chaldeans"), the potency and
superiority of which were accepted at face value. The origins of
the Chaldeans were debated; Hecataeus of Abdera (late fourth
century B.C.E.) argued that they were Egyptian colonists - a theory
perhaps related to the tradition, found earlier in Hellanicus, that
they were descended from Andromeda's father, who was king of
Ethiopia. It is possibly this association that led
pseudo-Democritus of Abdera (probably third century B.C.E.) to
include in his writings studies on Babylonian and Meroitic
hieroglyphs, as well as a Chaldean logos (an account of
customs, history and culture) possibly containing religious
syncretistic speculations. Again significant here is the quite
unnecessary false knowledge that prevailed during this period.
Cuneiform was still used in Babylonia at that time, and Akkadian
was being transcribed into Greek characters; Babylonian cults and
temples were well maintained and fully staffed, and traditional
rituals performed. Anyone seriously interested in Babylonian
culture, writing, religion and science could have obtained quite
reliable information. But the reality was clearly less attractive
than speculation about the obscurities of the mysterious East: a
kind of "orientalism" seems to have gained ground then,
whereby classical writers treated Assyrian (and Persian) history as
the unfathomable "other" forever implacably opposed to
Greek "rationalism."

Dinon of Colophon and an otherwise unknown Athenaeus (late
fourth century B.C.E.) both elaborated and improved on
Ctesoas's Persica, introducing a variant of the story
about Semiramis's rise to power. The popularity of the
Semiramis story, which indulged a Greek stereotypical image of the
East as a place where women could run public affairs, is reflected
in the development of the Ninus Romance, one of the
earliest preserved Hellenistic novels (first century BCE).
Semiramis was the subject of a painting by Aetion in the fourth
century B.C.E.. Baylonia, too, became the setting for romantic
stories: Xenophon of Antioch wrote a novel called Babylonian
Matters, and at the turn of the first century CE Soterichos
developed the romantic vignette about Panthea and Abderates, which
featured an incident in Xenophon of Athens's popular treatise
Cyropaedia (md fourth century BCE), by turning it into a
full-blown novel called The Experiences of Panthea, the
Babylonian Girl. Mesopotamia's distant past also provided
the backdrop for Iamblichus's novel A Babylonian
Story, which included the melodramatic adventures of a paur of
eastern lovers. Nothing could better illustrate the exotic and
fantastical aura that Mesopotamia evoked for classical writers and
their audiences than the satirical story by Lucian of Samosata
(second century CE), The True History, in which he
ridiculed scholarly preoccupation with discovering Homer's
birthplace, by presenting the epic poet confessing to him in the
Underworld that he came from Babylon.

Berossus

Learning another language and its script was not widespread in
the classical world. Would not Mesopotamian culture therefore have
remained difficult to access? Here one must remember that in the
Hellenistic period, when the greater part of the Near and Middle
East was incorporated into great kingdoms ruled by dynasties of
Macedonian origin, many Greeks were settled in colonies and cities
throughout the area, including Mesopotamia. Clearly intermarriages
took place, different cultural and linguistic groups lived in the
same settlements and served in the same armies. Moreover, there is
good evidence that some of the local scholars, learned in cuneiform
writing, knew Greek (the language of their new rulers) and were
familiar with Greek literary forms and philosophy. One such scholar
from Babylon was Berossus, who lived through the tumultous events
following Alexander's death, when Babylonia was the site of
devestating wars. From these bitter conflicts in which the
Babylonian cities and inhabitants suffered extensively, Seleucus
emerged victorious. The core of the huge realm that Seleucus built
up after his triumph was Babylonia; it was here that his first and
largest royal center was developed (Seleucia on the Tigris).
Particular attention was paid by Seleucus I's successor,
Antiochus I, to repairing the temple of Nabu at Borsippa and
completing the repairs on the great Marduk sanctuary in
Babylon.

This is the background to Berossus' life and work. From
later references it is known that he presented a history of
Babylonia (the Babyloniaca) to Antiochus I; it was in
three books and was written in Greek. It seems likely that this
work was a token of gratitude to the new kings who had restored
peace and stability to the region, intended to provide them with
historical and ideological support for legitimately controlling
Babylonia. Unfortunately, Berossus's work is preserved in
fairly small extracts, quoted in the writings of various later
historians, so that trying to reconstruct the original shape of his
history is difficult. Certain aspects of his work, however, seem
clear: Berossus made extensive use of Babylonian stories,
historical traditions, and chronicles; the first book contained a
geographical description of Babylonia and recounted the creation of
the world and the appearance of civilized life; the second detailed
the story of the Flood and enumerated the dynasties ruling before
and after that cataclysmic event down to the reign of Nabu-nasir;
the third covered the period of Assyrian domination over Babylonia,
the emergence of the great Neo-Babylonian Empire, and the
incorporation of Babylonia into the Persian Empire, probably ending
with Alexander's conquest. The focus throughout was firmly on
Babylonian, as distinct from Assyrian, history. Berossus seems to
have deliberately ignored the version of Mesopotamian history made
popular by Ctesias's Persica, and stressed the
importance of the Neo-Babylonian period, which had been almost
entirely squeezed out of Ctesias's picture.

Two other aspects of Berossus's Babyloniaca are
more debated, and there is much less agreement. The first are of
disagreement concerns the literary style and form employed by
Berossus in constructing the Babyloniaca. It has been
usual to assume that he would have used the terse style familiar
from the Babylonian chronicles, especially since many of the
preserved quotes contain rather dull lists of kings. What needs to
be remembered, however, is that this information derived from
Berossus appears in contexts where the interest of the writer was
focused exclusively on calculating the length of human history
since the creation of the world (e.g., Eusebius's Chronikoi
Kanones). So it was natural that whatever was gleaned from
Berossus should be presented in an abbreviated form that suited
this purpose. This becomes quite clear when one compares some of
this monotonous chronological material with quotes from Berossus in
works with a more philosophical or historical focus, such as
Josephus's Jewish Antiquities and his tract
Against Apion, or Celement of Alexandria's
Protrepticus. In these instances, Berossus's style
appears much more comparable to the Greek form of narrative
historiography. In one instance even Eusebius indicates how much he
has summarized Berossus's much more detailed information. It
could therefore be argued that Berossus, while using traditional
Babylonian material, substantially and deliberately reshaped it
following the well-established Greek forms of history writing, to
create a Babylonian history based on local sources but in a
literary form familiar to educated Greeks. It is therefore quite
conceivable that Antiochus I received from his learned Babylonian
subject an elegantly written Greek history of Babylonia displaying
familiarity with a number of philosophical and historical
approaches current in the Greek world.

The second dispute concerns some material that has circulated
since the first century B.C.E. under Berossus's name but
consists of astronomical information. Did this form part of the
Babyloniaca, and if so, where would it have appeared? Or
was it a separate work concentrating on astronomy and astrology,
for which the Babylonians had been famous since the fourth century?
Yet a third possibility, adopted by the main editor of the
fragments of the Greek historians, Felix Jacoby, is that this
astronomical lore has nothing to do with the Berossus who wroye in
the early third century B.C.E. but was produced later by someone
else and presented as his work. Unfortunately, Jacoby did not live
to complete his monumental study of the lost Greek histories, so
all that is available is the distinction he made between a genuine
Berossus, the writer of a historical work on Babylonia, and
pseudo-Berossus, an astronomer; we do not know Jacoby's reasons
for separating the two.

In more recent scholarship, some have argued that this
distinction is false, and that astronomical knowledge was so much a
part of Babylonian learning that Berossus would certainly have
included such material. It could have formed part of his account of
the creation of the world, or it could have been associated by him
with a supposed Babylonian concept of history, which was that
historical events moved through recurring cycles; in this case it
would have provided an indication of future events. A different
approach has been to study the astronomical information attributed
to Berossus more closely. This has led some to argue that there is
nothing in the material which harmonizes with what is known at
present of Babylonian astronomy. Rather, it has a distinctly Greek
cast to it, with an occasional Babylonian twist added, which gives
the impression that the material was produced by someone familiar
with Greek astronomy trying to authenticate a particular argument
by giving it a Babylonian flavor and "publishing" it as
from the pen of Berossus, a famous Babylonian scholar.

Berossus was read certainly for about two hundred years
following the appearance of his work; it is even possible that some
copies of the Babyloniaca continued to circulate for
another hundred years after that. But undisputedly in the first
century B.C.E. a summary of the Babyloniaca was produced by a
widely read Greek scholar, Alexander Polyhistor. It is very likely
that many of the people who made us of Berossus's work never
read the original but used Polyhistor's convenient compendium,
which embraced material gleaned from a mass of earlier historians.
Polyhistor's work seems to have had little merit aside from its
great range, and so it, too, has not survived. Moreover, Polyhistor
pulled together, seemingly quite uncritically, all the material on
different eastern peoples, so works of Greek writers on Assyria in
the Ctesias mold appeared cheek by jowl with Berossus's work
without any indication of the marked contradictions between them.
Given the established reputation of reliability so long enjoyed by
Ctesias's version of near eastern history, it seems that this
material which fitted Greco-Roman preconceptions and cultural
images so much more easily than the uncomfortable Berossus - who
omitted such well-known heroes as Ninus and Semiaramis from his
history - was greatly preferred to investigating the anomalous
material presented by the Babyloniaca, which could not be
slotted into the existing picture of Mesopotamia's past. What
did remain, powerfully, was Berossus's name and reputation as a
learned Babylonian. It is this which perhaps explains the sue made
of it in the creation of pseudo-Babylonian astronomical lore about
the same time that his history dropped out of circulation.

Some Final Thoughts on the Place of Mesopotamia in Hellenistic
Thought

It is difficult to define clearly the earliest Greek ideas about
the Mesopotamian cultural realm, although Greek soldiers in
Babylonian service must have repeated something of its wealth and
power. The process of trying to analyze the Persian Empire led
Greek writers to look more closely at the great states preceding
the rise of Persian power. Perhaps as a result of Persian
traditions, the Assyrian Empire was seen as the dominant political
entity, and considerable confusion existed about the status of
Babylonia in relation to it. Herodotos came nearest to defining the
Neo-Babylonian successor empire, although he seems to have
visualized it as a remnant of the Assyrian state. What came to be
the "orthodox" view of Mesopotamian history was that put
forward by Ctesias, in which Babylonia as a politically important
state was completely eliminated, replaced by Median power.

Berossus's attempt to assert the separateness and
independence of Babylonian history and culture had practically no
impact, although it obviously added to the existing confusion,
judging by some of the later puzzled comments to the effect that he
had taken no notice of Assyria. One group that did find Berossus
useful was Jewish and Christian writers to whom persons such as
Nebuchadnezzar (Nebuchadrezzar), as the destroyer of the Jerusalem
temple, were of prime interest. Berossus's depiction of an
immensely long Babylonian history in which figures ande events
appeared that tied in with biblical traditions (e.g., the Flood)
helped Judeo-Christian scholars to strengthen the claims to
authenticity of their own stories of the early past in the face of
general Greco-Roman skepticism. Aside from this limited use,
Berossus was remembered as mainly a learned Babyolnian and slotted
into pre-existing concepts of what Babylonian scholars did.

Different versions of Mesoptamia's past did not cancel each
other out, but coexisted in a series of set images that varied
little from each other: Semiramis was a famous Assyrian queen and
world conqueror, Nineveh was destroyed by the Medes, Babylonia was
part of Assyria, Babylon was a gigantic and wondrous city full of
women with lax morals, the Chaldeans were unrivaled astrologers.
When writers such as Diodorus Siculus or Strabo (first century
B.C.E.) presented descriptions of Mesopotamia, they explored mainly
Herodotus and Ctesias, differing in their selection of material
from Greek writers; at no point did they adduce any new evidence,
let alone anything from Berossus.

In spite of the Christianization of the Roman Empire, and hence
the increased use of summaries of writers such as Berossus to
calculate the dates of Creation and the Flood, the image of
Mesopotamia's past that derivived from the fifth- and
fourth-century Greek writers, with Ctesias's version
predominating, persisted. Herodotus acquired a reputation as a liar
quite early on, while Ctesias, with his vaunted use of Persian
sources, was thought to be the more reliable historian. In the
collection of summaries of the established literary corpus made for
Photius, the learned patriarch of Constantinople (ninth century
CE), Herodotus was judged to be the more elegant writer and Ctesias
the one with claims to greater authenticity.

Babylon in Medieval Thought

It was curiosity about the Bible - its histories, its ethnic
groups, its customs - that provided the earliest impetus among
learned and privileged Europeans to travel to the Middle East in
search of additional and deeper knowledge about the lands where the
biblical traditions were said to be born. Western travelers went
east also in search of the fabulous kingdom of Prester John, about
which reports began circulating from the middle of the twelfth
century. They were also responding to stories of the so-called
Marvels of the East, based on Genesis 6, according to which there
were races of monstrous men among the descendants of Adam who still
populated the East. Friar William of Rubruck opened his
thirteenth-century travel accounts with an admonition from
Ecclesiasticus: "He [the wise man] shall travel into foreign
countries and good and evil shall he try in all things"
(39:4). In the fourteenth century Friar Odoric gave his motivation
for travel in the following manner:

Although many stories and sundry things are reported by
various authors concerning the customs and conditions of this
world, yet I, Friar Odoric of Friuli, being desirious to travel
unto the foreign and remote countries of the unbelievers, also saw
and heard great and miraculous things, which I am able truly to
account (Quoted in Contemporaries of Marco Polo, p
213).

The northernmost of the several ruin mounds that make up the
ruins of the ancient city Babylonia bore the name Babil through the
centuries, and thus made its identification by medieval travelers
more secure. This name, however, actually applied only to the ruins
of the palace Nebuchadnezzar (Nebuchadrezzar), while the actual
site of the ancient city was at Hilla.

Benjamin of Tudela journeyed between 1160 and 1173 from his
homeland of Spain across Asia to the borders of China to ascertain
whether the way of life of the local Jews there was a prelude to
the fulfillment of biblical promises of the restoration of the
Jews. The earliest known European traveler's description from
the ruins of Babylon comes from his writings:

This is the ancient Babel, and now lies in ruins; but
the streets still extend thirty miles. The ruins of the palace of
Nebuchadnezzar are still to be seen; but people are afraid to
venture among them on account of the serpents and scorpions with
which they are infested. Twenty thousand Jews live within about
twenty miles from this place, and perform their worship in the
synagogue of Daniel, who rests in peace. This synagogue is of
remote antiquity, having been built by Daniel himself; it is
constructed of solid stones and bricks. Here, the traveler may also
behold the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, with the burning fiery furnace
into which were thrown Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah; it is a
valley well known to everyone. (Quoted in Contemporaries of
Marco Polo)

For Benjamin of Tudela, Babylon had relatively little
significance, except in its relation to the Jewish people, in
antiquity and at the time of his visit.

A thirteenth-century Arabic source, al-Qazwini, validates that
Babil was the name attached to a Mesopotamian site during this
period and gives a somewhat more informative description of the
nature of the site at that time:

Babil: the name of a village which formerly stood on
one of the branches of the Euphrates in Iraq. Currently, people
carry off bricks of its ruins, and there exists a well known as
"the Dungeon of Danayl" [Daniel] which is visited by Jews
and Christians on certain yearly occasions and on holidays. Most of
the population hold the opinion that this dungeon was the well of
Harut and Marut. (Quoted in G. Awad, "Babil," in
Encylopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 1, p.
846).

The Bavarian noble Johann Schiltberger, the author of the first
German travel book, spent the years 1396-1427 as a Turkish prisoner
of war, having been captured as a sixteen-year-old at the battle of
Nicopolis. Her served the Turkish sultan Bayazid I, after whose
defeat he moved among the followers of Tamerlane for some years. At
some point during these years he visited the site of Babylon, as he
recorded in his memoirs upon his return to Bavaria. He gives a
description of the ancient city plan, along with measurements of
the city walls that correspond exactly to those given by Herodotus.
The latter fact raises the question whether he accommodated his
measurements to those of Herodotus.

Like Benjamin of Tudela, Schiltberger misidentified the ruins of
Birs Nimrud (ancient Borsippa), which lie south of Babylon, with
the Tower of Babel. Because this misidentification had already
occurred in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 109a, Genesis Rabbah 38:11), it
is likely that both Benjamin of Tudela and Schiltberger relied on
its testimony for information on the layout of Babylon.